


Debts Unpaid

by cheloniidae



Category: BioShock
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 11:41:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6193759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack finds Jasmine's body— and, in Atlas's absence, a path forward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Debts Unpaid

Jack knows the screams are nothing more than the echoes of a ghost’s memory, but something in the  _I’m sorry, Mr. Ryan, no please don’t_ goes right past his brain and hooks into his hands and feet and spine. He was too slow to save Moira, too slow to save Patrick, too slow to save Langford. There has to be  _someone_  he can save, something deep inside of him says. If he can just get the door open, if he can just hit it hard enough—

The last of the screams dies away, leaving an echoing silence, and the door slides open without warning. Jack stumbles, barely stopping himself from falling onto a dried puddle of blood. There are shoes in it, a man’s shoes and a man’s hat and a metal pipe stained red with something too dark to be rust. All Ryan’s, Jack realizes. They can’t be anyone else’s.

They aren’t all Ryan left behind. On the bed in the back of the room, under a vaulted glass ceiling, past red curtains drawn back like a show is about to begin, there’s a woman’s body. The framed poster above the bed announces who lies below it, like a crooked paper tombstone. Jasmine Jolene, Andrew Ryan’s favorite gal.

Favorite enough to be battered, bruised, and abandoned to rot in a place like this.

Jack swallows down bile; his nails dig into the icicles jutting from his palm. Every time he thinks he’s numb to Fort Frolic’s horrors, it finds a new nerve to scrape raw. He knew from the moment he saw her ghost that she was long dead, but a part of him hoped…

Just once, he wants to not be too late.

His steps are careful as he makes his way to the bed, quiet as when he’d sneak breakfast into his parents’ room on Mother’s Day morning. His father would be out, hard at work tending the sheep, while his mother enjoyed her one day of rest. She’d always wake up before he snuck out, and she’d thank him, and she'd smile as broad as the sky—

But the only expression Jack can remember his mother making is the one from the sea-soaked picture in his wallet. Something about Jasmine drags the memories to the front of his mind, and the photograph with them. His mother half-smiling in black and white, his hand on her shoulder. It’s the only picture he has of him and his parents. And isn’t that strange, to only have one?

Pressure builds behind Jack’s eyes, a headache making room for itself, and he lets the question go. Thinking too hard about his parents hurts. Not like homesickness, but like touching electrified water. It always has, even before Rapture. He thought about asking Atlas whether that was normal, but after the sub, it would be nothing but cruel. Jack has his parents waiting for him, his farm, his dogs. And Atlas doesn’t have anything — anyone — left.

Jack wonders if there’s anyone left to miss Jasmine.

Since the plane crashed into the Atlantic, Jack has seen hundreds of corpses. It doesn’t make Jasmine’s easier to look at. Ocean-filtered light dances across her body, reflects off the bloodstains on her bed and pillow and dress. Her face is sunken, blackening gray-purple skin stretched too tight across bone. Her mouth is open in one last unheard plea; her arm is raised to shield her head. And that was all Jasmine had to defend herself with: her arms and her words against Ryan’s metal pipe. Murder, not a fight.

It’s plain and simple, the kind of clear-cut right and wrong that seemed to vanish with Cohen’s first set of instructions. (Hunting down Steinman was different, he told himself, but the disciples—) But Andrew Ryan murdered a woman with his own two hands. That truth is solid enough for Jack to hold onto, solid enough to make the ground feel steady for the first time since Atlas’s signal went silent. Jasmine’s death is a compass, pointing him to Hephaestus. Nothing’s so steadying as righteous fury.

“He won’t get away with it.” Jack's voice is hoarse; he hasn’t spoken since he-doesn’t-know-when. “He'll never hurt anybody again.” Jasmine can’t hear it, can’t hear anything, but he has to say something. Her screams carved out a silence inside him, jagged like broken glass. Sharp enough to cut Jack if he doesn’t fill it. Prayers don’t do the dead any good, says Pastor Rollins, and Jack’s always thought promises have a kind of holiness to them. So that’s what he gives Jasmine Jolene, standing at her bedside. Wishing there was someone to bury her.

“I’ll tear his heart out,” he swears. Atlas’s words are rage-red like the dawn, the closest Jack’s come in Rapture to feeling sunshine. And God, Jack misses him.

One more disciple to hunt down, one more photograph for Cohen’s collection. Then Hephaestus and Atlas’s voice and a bullet between Ryan’s eyes. Jack has it all mapped out in his head, and when he sees the bleeding plaster that makes him want to start screaming and never stop, that’s what he holds on to. He can’t stop until it’s over. For Moira’s sake, and Patrick’s, and Julie’s, and Jasmine’s. And whatever he does to get there— it's justified. It has to be.

There’s blood to be paid, and promises to keep.


End file.
